The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine

We slept next to each other for the first time last night- The Flowering Wand pressed against my leg, a soft yet electrical jolt becoming each time it distinguished itself from the velvet cover. This held me in the wake-sleep dream state that can be agitating or charming, depending on which goals can be embraced with allowance for what can’t help but be. We night-dreamed next to each other after eleven days of courtship on the granite kitchen table. Though, I do believe this romance began further back than I can remember, because our togetherness is a deeper knowing and a longing that has been alive in me.The first time we engaged in continuous touch was honoring the way the edges of the pages could guide my ink pen to make lines on leather so I could cut the shapes made. These new formations are holding other paper, ink-dyed and rolled, for a set of selenite scrolls. I experienced how the straight cut, neatly-bound pages containing the words were clearly going to make certain that they were to have a hand in other paper for other words, worlds, and sounds to be expressed upon. A relationship was blossoming. Classic magic- I still had not physically cracked open the book.How to write a re-view without reading? Well, I have viewed.The first time truly I laid eyes on this book was to brush mirror paint, shaping magic eyes with a fine tipped brush, onto shells. So maybe I laid shells on it, and the eyes became, as what happens when the deep ocean life meets The Flowering Wand.I do look forward to meeting its gaze, in the traditional sense of reading a book, and for now I am simply and intricately listening. Of course. Or course we are creating the course.I have tasted this book. I have tasted it with honey and rhizomes. Truly. One era of the eleven days at the kitchen table was dripping fresh ginger and turmeric fermented honeys, prepared on the Autumnal Equinox, into bottles with my beloved. After sprinkling dashes of Peganum Harmala, schisandra, turkey tail, blue lotus, and other friends that wanted to join, the borosilicate bottles were corked and sealed in beeswax and cave dirt from my birthday portal ritual, a few days before Sophie’s birthday. The bottles were set a few feet away and the next morning I came down to find a glimmery, sappy, fizzy puddle on this wild, wild book. The nectar of active yeasts and bacteria made these bubbly worlds the pappus that caught lift for the propulsion of the cork, as a seed, landing upon this book, beckoning my tongue to the book cover so these worlds could activate me and within me. I licked the book. Of course, I licked the book. I am still savoring.So much viewing and reviewing from new eyes with consecutive and erratic birth.It has held resurrection fern ritual terrariums, snake vertebrae and armadillo scales, vials being filled with medicine, been smothered in cacao- all in incedental reverence- before making its way upstairs… We’ve just met and there’s almost more than I can digest, so we’ll just have to breathe and lay next to the creek now that it’s come down from the canyon, and wait to submerge until the powerful rumble has quietted and softened to an invitation to get in.For now, we have other ideas.Thank you for being and creating in this world, and all of them.This book is highly and deeply recommended.

Lives up to the hype, and more. Can't wait for her next book.

Ever wonder wtf is wrong with Us? This is a beautiful and important book for our collective growth and future. This book is a flower breaking through the cement of our culture. A gentle but powerful examination of what lies central to all of the burdensome mythologies we have carried for millennia and struggled to integrate. Using mycological and nature-based threads to explore, question, connect, reveal and digest gems hidden within our violent and traumatic mythologies Sophie Strand shines a light on what has always been there for us ( I won't spoil it for you). This book is particularly beneficial for men and those who live on Earth with men ( :) ), and for people who want to heal the wounds of our culture, to birth something better with the support of what has always been fundamental to our being: loving kindness and enjoyment as directive force for positive change in our collective community of beings.

Reading Sophie Strand's work is something one should embark upon with informed consent. Every sentence she writes will begin to compost a form, a structure, a way of being or seeing that we have taken as normal (and yet is anything but for a species living on the earth). With unassuming ferocity, Strand points us toward the future of what we must embody to survive as a being among many on this planet, and illuminates the places where we have been uprooted and alienated from our inherent belonging. With The Flowering Wand, she invites us to unlearn the way of the sword (control and cutting), and remember the way of the wand (creation and connection), reimagining the potency and power of the masculine within ourselves and in our society. I recommend this book, and all of Strand's work, to everyone who longs for this deep remembering.

Sophie Strand's new book, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine is a must read. Her deep-hearted research and rewilding myths of the masculine is exactly what we need in these times. I’ve already ordered copies for many of my friends.I so often hear women ask: what about the men? How do we help them? One way is to re-view the old patriarchal stories and myths which have been compromised by models of power over, emotional disconnection, and destructive individualism, and ground them into the rich soil of creative connection and healing.Drink in and digest Sophie's wisdom to vision new possibilities by returning to the old hidden roots. With each chapter I read my mind is expanded, turned inside out in the best of ways, and reconnected to the mycelia webs of soil and ecosystems and animal / plant / microbial magic.

Sophie Strand pulls on the threads of myths ancient, old and new, and dares us to allow ourselves to see the masculine in a new light and she invites new conversations, new stories from all of us. Three of my many favorite quotes: "Ensoulment is ensoilment. Soul is soil." And, "No one is coming to save us. But everyone is coming to save everyone." And, "We also need to get in touch with that golden hearth inside ourselves that is not tied to progress and is not tied to one human lifetime. That part of us that remembers the first acorn and the first raindrop." Long live Tom Bombadil!

This breathtaking book offers us back stories we think we know--from David and Narcissus to Orpheus and Jesus--and shows us how they are each wild imaginings of what it really means to be a man. Strand revels in the artists and the healers and the magicians as she composts the old tales into new fruitings to guide us through the times ahead. This book is a game-changer, a must-read...better, for sure, than The Heroes Journey, and more important than Iron John. This is a book I will pass to every man in my life...and to every woman with a father, a son, a lover, and a friend. It's essential. And Strand is a poet and natural storytellers so it's also a sheer delight to read and savor the unforgettable words.

Wondrous - a quivering gift of healing for the maimed myths and painfully partial masculinities of the modern era. Sophie Strand's book stands apart from so much of the shallow hucksterism that beckons to the mythic man-child these days. It's wise, it's crackling with wisdom, intimacy and animacy. Like Deardorff & Yunkaporta, it's best read slowly with periods of wandering between chapters and I was sorry when it came to an end. It's truly a work of en-soiled beauty and deep medicine for these times. Thank you!

I love Sophie Strand's wild thinking and her deep minded writing, and so was very much looking forward to reading 'The Flowering Wand'. I enjoyed the format of exploring different masculine figures from myth as a way to weave a new masculinity for our times, one that is deeply woven into, and wedded to, the earth. The imperative to do this is a matter of survival and there was much in this book that aids that new weaving.I have heard Sophie talk about this subject and felt that she drew out themes that are less well explored in the book. It sometimes feels they there is a beautiful truth here that is never quite drawn out and that left me feeling rather frustrated in a way that I can't quite pinpoint. I loved the theme of mycelial rootedness that moves through the book and felt that that could have been drawn out even more. Somehow, the book lacks an anchor, or a tap root, that might aid understanding. But perhaps that was the intention.There is some beautiful writing here, and some difficult and important themes. Ultimately, I gained more from her short essay 'Jesus is a Fungal God', which can be found on her blog, but there is much in 'A Flowering Wand' that is valuable and worth further exploration. I am so grateful that Sophie Strand added to the conversation.

This is the only work of non fiction that's ever made me cry tears of joy. I'll be buying it for many of my friends. Everybody should read it

I am in awe at the insights Sophie has had about the deforming of myths to fit the needs of the patriarchy, and how straitjacketed I have been, as a man, into the masculine choices I have been limited to. As a long-time adherent of the Hero's Journey, it was disconcerting to be faced with the need for a more collective, communal monomyth, but surely these times demand it. I think the effects of this book will never leave me. Truly a belief-changer.

From the opening introduction of this book it is clear the author does not understand symbolism in Myth - taking literally the function of a sword rather than what it symbolically represents. The ideas are bold and imaginative but are tangential and they have no depth or follow through, to call them essays is a stretch - they are more like loosely formed opinions, puddle deep with no follow through. Strand is articulate, and obviously well-read but she offers nothing of real substance to the debate on masculinity and ignores a great deal of important work in the process that could helped her understand the subject better.Read "Iron John" by Robert Bly, and "He" by Robert A. Johnson for a far more appropriate take on how masculinity and myth/story meet.